Drawing in the Colony

Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, vol. 152, part 2, 2019, pp. 203–215. ISSN 0035-9173/19/020203-13 Drawing in the Colony Louise Anemaat Executive Director, Library & Information Services and Dixson Librarian, State Library of NSW Email: [email protected] Abstract Before photography, recording images required drawing or painting, and, without printing, reproduc- ing images required copying by hand. This paper discusses drawings dating back to first European settlement in New South Wales, specifically a large collection of 745 zoological and botanical drawings from the 1790s which was bought by the State Library in 2011. Who were the artists? Which were the originals and which the copies? Answers are not easily obtained. We can however enjoy the images, very well preserved. Introduction1 food shortages and rationing, and a crippling ur usual picture of the convict colony sense of isolation, of having been dumped, Ofounded in January 1788 at Sydney abandoned and forgotten, but there were Cove focuses, rightly, on extremes of hard- also people who found the time and space to ship, isolation and punishment, the sudden explore and observe, and to draw and record dispossession of Indigenous cultures, on the the strange new world that they found in environmental and psychological impacts of NSW. colonisation, isolation and distance. This has prompted us to look more closely The stories we tell are of crimes and mis- at natural history drawings, and the practice demeanours, and the slow conquering of a of drawing during roughly the first twelve or landscape that at the time was considered so years of the colony. both alien and inferior. Today the impression Drawing in the Colony remains of a nation built on near starvation, suffering, floggings and hangings and a sense Drawing started early in the colony. The of utter futility. first drawing likely to have been made in But could our ideas about the First Fleet the colony was of a Grass Tree, drawn on have become just a little lazy? 11 February 1788, just two weeks after the Of course, there is truth in these endur- arrival of the fleet of eleven convict ships ing stories. Life in the colony was without at Sydney Cove, by surgeon Arthur Bowes question a difficult, bewildering and alien- Smyth (Illus. 1). ating experience. The climate was harsh The literature devoted to the art of Aus- and unfamiliar, the environment was chal- tralia’s First Fleet is thick on the ground and lenging and unpredictable. There were dire it is rare for new material to surface to add to the canon of existing drawings but this is exactly what occurred in 2011 when a large 1 A lecture given at the Australian National Maritime collection of 745 botanical and zoological Museum, on 15 June 2019, under the auspices of drawings from the 1790s appeared on the the Australiana Fund. The article is extracted from Anemaat (2014). market, from a private aristocratic library 203 Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Anemaat — Drawing in the Colony held at Knowsley Hall near Liverpool, Eng- present as a tangled knot of problems — land, and owned by the 19th Earl of Derby. drawings held privately, or held in collecting The drawings had been compiled during the institutions in the United Kingdom, Ger- 1790s by a now forgotten but then widely many, New Zealand and Australia. known and acclaimed botanist, Aylmer Only some very, very few of the drawings Bourke Lambert. They were acquired for are signed, and can therefore be formally the collection of the State Library of NSW ascribed to a small number of either naval in 2011. and convict artists, or ships’ surgeons. Attri- butions then are uncertain. Two artists who consistently signed their drawings were Midshipman George Raper, who had a distinctive personal style; there is a lovely sinuousness in his drawings (Illus. 2). Thomas Watling, a convict with art train- ing, also signed his work against the explicit instructions of his overseer and patron, First Fleet Surgeon-General John White. Watling 1: Grass tree or “A View of the Tree at had been transported for forgery, escaped en Botany Bay, wh yields ye Yellow Balsam, & route at Cape of Good Hope, and eventually of a Wigwan,” 1788/Arthur Bowes Smyth. arrived in NSW in 1792. Watercolour (Mitchell Library ML Safe 1/15 no. 6 FL1607156) The emergence of these drawings prompted new, detailed art historical analy- sis of the traditions of natural history art production and its convention of copying and trans-Pacific dissemination. And I think it is fair to say that while we knew the collection was something special, we didn’t quite know exactly what we had at the time. What could the sudden emergence of a large, previously unknown collection of natural history drawings from NSW, add to our understanding of those early years of the colony? 2: “Bird and flower of Port Jackson,” or We will look more closely at how this col- Kookaburra (Dacelo novæguineæ), 1789/George lection fitted in with other, known collec- Raper. Watercolour. (Raper Collection drawing tions from the same period, why and how its no. 57. Natural History Museum, London) appearance has made us look again at what we thought we knew. Adding to the confusion is the fact that The various sets and collections of water- that the strong demand for images of new colour drawings from the same period still species amongst gentlemen, and occasionally women, amateurs of science in Britain meant 204 Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Anemaat — Drawing in the Colony that copying was rife — in England which is perhaps not surprising, but also in NSW, and possibly also on board, shared by officers on board returning ships, or even copied by Company Artists in India during stopovers. Accordingly, art historians and curators have, for convenience, assigned comparable works into a couple of broad stylistic and tem- poral groupings: “The Port Jackson Painter” and “The Sydney Bird Painter,” for instance. Though each of these implies a single artist’s hand at work, the Port Jackson Painter probably refers to at least six, possibly eight, different artists. The Sydney Bird Painter attribution refers to at least two people — 3: Edward Smith-Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby, one superior artist and one far less talented. 1837/William Derby. Oil on canvas. Courtesy To complicate things even more, the early The Rt Hon. The Earl of Derby history and provenance of the drawings has for almost every collection become obscured. Some of these related collections have been held by cultural institutions for decades, for over a century, but the connections between them have largely gone unnoticed. The Derby Collection We now refer to the Knowsley Hall drawings as the Derby Collection for the 13th Earl of Derby (Illus. 3) who had purchased the collection in 1842, following the death of his friend, Aylmer Bourke Lambert (Illus. 4). Lambert had compiled the collection during his lifetime. The public emergence of this collection has been a little like finding that lost piece of a jigsaw at the back of the sofa. Comparing and considering this newly emerged collection of drawings alongside 4: Frontispiece Lambert (1803–07) other known collections has shown them to be intimately interconnected. Three volumes we knew were well docu- The collection consists of 745 natural mented copies of drawings from the iconic history drawings bound into six volumes. Watling Collection compiled by John White Half had not been seen since at least the who had lent his collection to botanist 1940s; the existence of the other half was Alymer Bourke Lambert in 1797. Lambert completely unrecorded. then had White’s drawings copied. Since 205 Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Anemaat — Drawing in the Colony 1902 the Watling Collection has been held Copying in London’s Natural History Museum while Copying has become a central part of the Lambert’s copies have been in the Derby story of drawing and art practice in the library since Lambert’s death in 1842. colony: copying was a valid way of circulat- We know the background and contexts ing drawings, a way of responding to the of many of Lambert’s drawings because fascination of the new, of feeding the appe- Lambert was such a prolific and enthusias- tite of people like Sir Joseph Banks and their tic letter-writer to his friend, James Edward extensive like-minded networks, to possess Smith, founder of the Linnaean Society, their own drawings, to assist their publishing London. Lambert’s letters to Smith are now ambitions, to fill in gaps in their knowledge. held in the Linnaean Collection. Lambert, Quite the extent of the copying that took Derby and Smith were friends and passion- place in London and particularly in Sydney ate enthusiasts for natural history. Cove had not been fully appreciated. In par- Despite their extensive correspondence, ticular the extent to which artists in NSW three of the six volumes from the Derby were working together or in reference to each library appear completely unrecorded and other. It quickly became apparent that the undocumented before 1842, when acquired same images appear, again and again, re-used by Derby from Lambert’s estate. by different artists, and now part of differ- The drawings, bold and striking examples ent collections in different institutions and of Australian birds, plants, fish, a handful of different countries. mammals and a single scene, that in 1788, Which set of drawings might be the origi- with the arrival of the First Fleet in Sydney nals is unknown, or perhaps no longer know- Cove, were so strange and wondrous, puz- able.

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